Monday, September 7
Right on schedule at 7:25 p.m., Wow Airlines flight 118
thunders down the runway at Washington-Baltimore International Airport and I’m
off. To, of all places, Iceland.
Why Iceland? Two reasons:
l. My great aunt Grace: My mother’s aunt, who died when I
was nine, was a spinster schoolteacher whose estate consisted of stacks and
stacks of musty National Geographic
magazines dating back to the 1920s. By the time I was a teenager I had read
them all. They, more than anything, were my real education, showing me the
world outside my rural Missouri hometown was mine for the taking. One of my favorite
issues was about Iceland, featuring black and white photos of glaciers,
geysers, volcanoes, boiling springs, waterfalls and tidy farmhouses with turf
roofs snuggled against cloud-topped mountains. I resolved I would someday go
there but never got around to it. For the last three or four months as I’ve
been baking in Florida’s nonstop summer sun, I’ve been thinking about Iceland a
lot. It will be – just counted them up – my thirty-eighth country.
2. I can’t resist a bargain: Wow is a new Iceland-based
discount airline that flies from Boston and Washington/Baltimore. For months I
have been checking its website, hoping to score a deal. When I learned I was to
be in Washington Labor Day weekend, I checked again and wow, a round-trip for
$298, the cheapest rate I’d seen, provided I could leave Monday night and
return Friday. Of course I could. I’m retired. My wife has commitments at home – cold weather isn’t her thing anyway – so here
I am, bound for the Arctic by myself.
I love traveling with my wife – we’ve visited every
continent except Antarctica – but I also like traveling on my own. It goes back to the summer
between my junior and senior year of college when I backpacked around Europe. I
flew there with a friend. We intended to spend six weeks seeing the sites
together but discovered, after a week, that we got on each other’s nerves. We went
our own ways and I spent the rest of the trip doing exactly what I wanted to do,
seeing exactly what I wanted to see, spending as much or as little time as I
wanted to in any particular place. It was, up to that point, the highlight of my life
and still ranks right up there with the biggies.
Wow is better than I would have expected for twice the
price. The plane is brand-new. The flight attendants are drop-dead gorgeous, wearing
tailored purple suits with military-style garrison caps, their hair done up in
buns. These are honest-to-God glamorous stewardesses, a welcome and unexpected throwback
to the days before ugly women could become flight attendants. I’ve scored a
window seat behind an exit row and, hot damn, there’s no seat in front so I can
s-t-r-e-t-c-h out. I am planning to sleep all the way so I can hit the ground
running after the six-hour flight.
Scratch that. There’s a screaming kid one row back, across
the aisle. This kid is three or four, old enough that her mother ought to be
able to reason with her. She has been screaming bloody murder, at the top of her
lungs, since lift-off. My youngest son, when he was two or so, tended to behave
badly whenever we flew so I was willing to cut the mother some slack for the
first half hour, figuring the kid would scream herself to sleep. But if
anything the kid is sounding more desperate as the hours pass.
The mother tried carrying the kid up and down the aisle but the
screaming continued full force, annoying passengers not just in the middle of
the plane where I am sitting, but at the front and back as well, so she was
asked to return to her seat. She then allowed the child to run up and down the
aisle, shrieking like a banshee, prompting the flight attendant to instruct her,
firmly, to get the kid under control, but the mother just shrugged. It’s been
going on for four hours at this point and every passenger within 15 rows in
front of or behind the kid is wide-awake. If someone were to grab the kid off
the mother’s lap, hurl her to the floor and stomp her brains all over the
purple carpet with the Wow logo woven into it, the rest of us would get
together and buy that person a drink.
Over Greenland, five hours into the flight, as I am trying
but unable to read my book because of the noise, the Aurora Borealis – the Northern Lights – appear in the distance, a ribbon
of shimmering purple and green that undulates almost rhythmically across the
heavens for five magical minutes. Absolutely amazing, perhaps the most
beautiful sight I have ever seen. The Northern Lights are the one thing I most wanted
to see on this trip, though there’s no guarantee they’ll appear on any given
night, particularly in early September; they’re more commonly seen in winter. I
am lucky. Now I won’t have to ride out into the countryside on a bus at 10 p.m.
with 50 other tourists to get away from the lights of Reykjavik in hopes of
seeing them. If, on such tours, the lights don’t appear by 2 a.m., guests are
driven back to their hotels and invited to try again the next night (and the
next, and the next, etc.) for no extra charge but they don’t get their money
back if, for any reason, they don’t see them. And to think I would have missed
them if it weren’t for the kid.
 |
From the plane, I couldn't get a pic of the Northern Lights
with my iPhone (I tried) but they looked (sort of) like this |
As the pilot announces our descent into Keflavik
International Airport, the kid falls asleep in her mother’s arms.
Tuesday, September 8
Clearing passport control and arriving in the baggage claim
area, I’m surprised to see crewmembers from Wow and Icelandair flights that
originated in the U.S. are also waiting for luggage to arrive. Odd. All of them
already have their standard crew wheelies with them.
Once the bags are delivered, they begin hoisting off the belt huge
suitcases that are clearly packed to the max. Iceland is a tiny nation of only
300,000 people. The climate and soil are too harsh to grow much and there are
few natural resources so almost everything – food, clothes, drugs, tools,
appliances – has to be imported. Even ordinary things are expensive here. From
the looks of those bulging suitcases, crewmembers go shopping when they fly to
the States. What’s in those bags? Kids’ clothes from Sears? Heinz ketchup from
Safeway? Car parts? The crewmembers all choose the “Nothing to Declare” line at
customs.
Rental cars are expensive here, too. I’ve booked one from a
company mentioned in my Lonely Planet
guidebook that was half the price of an Avis, Hertz or Eurocar rental. I’m
annoyed to discover the company has no desk at Keflavik. But neither do half a
dozen other companies that have stationed representatives near the exit,
holding up logoed signs with the names of travelers who have booked with them. I
ask one if he knows where I can find the representative from my company. He
says that guy rarely comes around but if I wait around long enough he might
show up. So I wait. I buy a coffee while I wait some more. Finally, I hail a
cab and tell the driver to take me to the address shown on my reservation. He
points out it’s across the parking lot, about two blocks away.
There’s a driving rain, the temperature is in the high 40s,
and I’m soaked and pissed by the time I get there. When I ask the clerk, a
sullen Middle Easterner, why nobody met me, he says an airport pick-up would
have cost 2,000 kroner (about $14) extra. I reply I wish the company’s web site
had mentioned that so I could have made a choice. He shrugs – he’s obviously
heard it before – and hands me the keys to a Suzuki Jimny AWD parked in front that
appears to be the only car the company has. It’s rusted, dented, and, when I
start it up, I see there are 279,000 kilometers on the odometer. There’s a
faint odor of something burning as I exit the lot and head to Reykjavik, the
country’s capital and largest city where I’ll be based for the next three days.
The landscape between Keflavik and Reykjavik is almost lunar
– large black volcanic rocks, some covered with moss. Not that I can see it
clearly. It’s foggy and raining. And windy. Boy, is it windy. I’m afraid the
Jimny is going to be blown off the road.
I arrive at my hotel an hour later only to learn the Nordic
Hilton has no record of my reservation. I hand the clerk a printout confirming
I made one. He invites me to help myself to a cup of coffee and disappears to
confer with a manager. A few minutes later he reappears. The issue has been resolved,
my room is ready. Great news for this weary traveler. It’s only 8 a.m. and the
room wasn’t supposed to be ready until 2 p.m.
I go upstairs, shut the blackout curtains, get in bed and
wait for sleep that doesn’t come. It’s noisy; the wind is howling against my
seventh floor window. Plus I’ve had two coffees since landing. Dumb. At least I’m
finally able to read my book.
At noon, having failed to sleep, I head up the street,
looking for something to eat. While I generally look forward to trying the cuisine
of any new country I visit, I’m fairly sure I’m not going to be seeking out
Icelandic food which, from what I’ve read, includes puffin (an Arctic bird that
looks like a cross between a penguin and parrot), minka whale, lamb (I haven’t
eaten that since our trip to Tasmania where we saw thousands of baby lambs frolicking
with their mothers), air-dried fish and, grossest of all, horse.
I duck into a Vietnamese restaurant, which, it turns out,
serves excellent food. I ask the owner if he’s the only Vietnamese in Iceland.
He laughs and says no, there are a few more.
It’s still raining and the wind is stronger than ever;
walking back to the hotel I fear for a moment it is going to knock me over. No
longer hungry but still tired, I drive a few blocks to Laugardalslaug, one of
six public outdoor pools in Reykjavik. All are open year-around and are heated
by geothermal springs that, the guidebook says, also provide all the heat and
hot water for homes and businesses throughout the city. If a dip in a boiling
pool won’t wake me up, nothing will.
For the equivalent of $8, I’m issued a towel (I brought my
own swim trunks), shown to a changing room and told to shower thoroughly –
management is strict that bathers must be clean all over since the waters
aren’t chlorinated. Just outside the locker room is a large pool where
schoolchildren are taking swimming lessons, along with a number of “hot pots” –
concrete-lined hot tubs that accommodate up to a dozen people, each featuring
different water temperatures of increasing intensity. The hottest is 44 C (111 F).
I watch to see what my fellow bathers do – mostly people my
age and older, anyone younger is at work – and as they do, move from pot
to pot until I find one that suits me just right. And I learn that soaking in a
boiling hot tub that’s emitting steam into the Arctic air – it’s about 45
degrees – in a driving rain is just what I need to wake up. Funny, I hardly
ever use the pool in my own backyard because, as I complain to my wife, it’s
too cold, even in summer. So I fly all the way to Iceland and what’s the first
thing I do? Jump in a pool.
 |
| A hot pot at Laugardalslaug. I didn't take this pic either. |
Energized, I head downtown to see if what I’ve read is true –
that Reykjavik is one of Europe’s most charming capitals. After an hour of
walking around (in the rain, which hasn’t abated one whit since I got here this
morning; people are wearing winter coats covered with rain slickers), I decide
it isn’t. If you’ve ever taken a Caribbean cruise, imagine one of the port
cities in which your ship docked, be it Phillipsburg, Nassau, Oranjestad,
Charlotte Amalie or wherever. All these cities, when you get down to it, look pretty
much alike, a bunch of two-or three-story buildings containing restaurants,
bars and overpriced shops selling stuff you don’t need. That basically
summarizes downtown Reykjavik. Disappointing but then, I didn’t come to Iceland
to see cities.
According to my guidebook, the number one attraction in
Reykjavik is something called the Phallus Museum featuring (you guessed
it) schlongs from dozens of species. (Here's this advertising man's suggestion for attracting more visitors: Change the name to the Icelandick Museum.) The second most-important attraction is
the main shopping street, which I’ve just seen. Numbers three through five are art
museums. None represent my idea of a fun way to spend what’s left of the
afternoon.
But, the Northern Lights Center near the harbor sounds
intriguing so I head there, where I learn what causes the Aurora Borealis (charged
particles from the sun enter earth’s atmosphere around the poles) and the myths
accorded to these mysterious lights by people who live in the parts of the
world over which they appear including Alaska, Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Scandinavia
and Russia. Interesting stuff.
From there I head to the Settlement Museum to learn about the
Vikings who discovered Iceland around 800 – how they lived and settled what has
to be one of the most inhospitable places on the planet. One of those Vikings, Leif
Ericson, supposedly beat Columbus to the New World by 500 years.
A somewhat-related digression: Icelanders take a parent’s
first name as their last name, to which the suffix “son” (for son) or “dottir
(for daughter) is added. Leif was the son of Eric the Red, so his surname became
Ericson (Eric’s son). If were Icelandic, I wouldn’t be Tom Dryden. I’d be Tom Gilbertson,
since my father’s name was Gilbert. My sons’ last name would be Thomasson
(Thomas’ son). My daughter LaToya (for demo purposes, I don’t have a daughter)
would be known by my wife’s first name, Judy. That would make her LaToya Judysdottir.
We now return you to our regularly scheduled blog post.
I also learn why the Icelandic language is so difficult to
read, speak and understand. Icelandic, as it is spoken today, is basically the
same language the early Vikings, who came from western Norway, spoke 1,000
years ago. Whereas the language now spoken in Norway has evolved with the
times, the Norwegian spoken in Iceland has stayed pretty much the same since
the island was settled because it’s in the middle of nowhere, high up in the
north Atlantic a thousand miles west of Europe and a few hundred miles east of
Greenland. Because Icelandic has no relationship to any language other than an
extinct version of western Norwegian, it’s nearly impossible for non-natives to
learn. The government actually provides grants to foreigners willing to study
it.
Vietnamese food is like Chinese food. An hour after you eat
it you’re hungry again. It has been six hours since lunch and I’ve been hungry for
five of them. I don’t want to cruise up and down the rainy streets looking for
a restaurant, so I head back to my hotel, remembering a restaurant near the
Vietnamese place that looked promising. There were a number of entrees on the
menu posted outside that sounded good.
And I’m in luck, there’s a table for one near the window.
Unfortunately – and if you’re squeamish stop right here and skip
to the next paragraph – there’s something on the menu I hadn’t noticed when I eyeballed
it earlier: filet of foal. I ask the waiter, hoping there’s some mistake but
there isn’t. “It’s one of the most popular items on our menu,” he tells me
proudly, assuming I’m about to order it. I don’t want to eat anything that
might come on a plate that once held filet of Mr. Ed so I tell him I’ve changed
my mind and am no longer hungry. Two doors down I find an Italian restaurant.
Shortly after 9 p.m. I pop a Benadryl, read half a page of
my guidebook and am out like a light, despite the ferocious wind howling
outside.
Wednesday, September
9
Waking up at 9 a.m., I realize I’m already several hours
behind the schedule I’ve established for my second day in Iceland. Today’s the
day I plan to drive the Golden Circle, a route that isn’t circular, that takes
in three of Iceland’s most popular attractions – Geysir (Iceland’s version of
Old Faithful), Gullfoss (Europe’s largest waterfall) and Thingvellir National
Park, where, in the 900s, Icelandic settlers established the world’s first
democratic congress which, I’m going to assume here, probably worked better
than the one we have in Washington.
After a couple of cups of coffee and a Skyr, an incredibly
smooth and delicious Icelandic spin on yogurt, one of the few native foods I’m
willing to try, I’m on my way. It’s still raining and I keep a tight grip on
the steering wheel, fearing the wind will blow the Jimny either off the road or into
the path of an oncoming vehicle.
The countryside east of Reykjavik doesn’t resemble in the
least the landscape I saw yesterday coming from the airport. I’m driving up and
down rolling hills and am surrounded by mountains. I can’t tell how high the mountains
are, all are shrouded in fog. This land
is sparsely settled; there’s a farmhouse every three or four miles. There are
lots of sheep and – alas – beautiful horses eating moss and low grasses that
are somehow green despite the bone-chilling cold.
 |
I grew up in a tiny Missouri town, Auxvasse, that was named by
French settlers. People who don't know better try to pronounce it
phoenetically, Ox-vass, but they're wrong, it's pronounced Of Oz,
as in the movie about the Wizard. This sign, indicating a waterfall on the
Oxara River ("foss" is Icelandic for waterfall) comes as close
to that incorrect pronunciation as anything I've ever seen.
|
Climbing a hill about 30 miles into the trip, I realize the
car behind me is right on my tail. I accelerate but … nothing. I downshift from
fifth to fourth to pick up traction, but the Jimny goes slower … and slower …
and, just over the crest, comes to a stop. Luckily I am able to pull off the
road onto the shoulder. Something stinks. Can’t say for sure what it is but
I’ve smelled it before. The Jimny will start but the transmission won’t engage
in any gear.
 |
| My POS rental Jimny, broken down in the middle of nowhere |
I wasn’t planning to turn on my cell phone and incur
international roaming charges on this trip but I’m glad I have it with me. I
call the emergency number on my rental contract and tell the woman who answers –
every Icelander I’ve encountered speaks perfect English – that the car is
broken down, and give her my best estimate of where I am. She promises to
dispatch someone with a replacement vehicle but says it will be at least two
hours. Swell. I have two more days in Iceland and it looks like the best part
of this one is already shot. The rain and wind pick up and the fog intensifies
as I sit in the broken-down Jimny, hoping a vehicle won’t come speeding over
the hill and crash into mine.
Amazingly, an hour and a half later, out of the fog, a Ford
F-150 appears pulling a flatbed trailer with a brand-new Jimny. The driver’s
best guess is that after 279,000 miles, the clutch finally burned out or slipped
or something like that – how the hell would I know, do I look like a mechanic? I’m
on my way within minutes.
 |
| Gunnar (that was his name) saves the day |
A few miles down the road I see a twenty-something couple lugging
huge backpacks. Their thumbs are out and they are looking toward me hopefully. It’s
pouring. And cold, with gale force winds.
I could never have published this when my mother was alive –
she would have killed me – but the summer I backpacked around Europe, I had a
Eurrail pass to get me from place to place. But when the train schedule didn’t
jive with mine I hitched rides, just like these kids are doing, and remember
how grateful I was when someone gave me a lift. I stop, lean over to open the
passenger door and gesture for them to get in.
The hitchhikers, Yves and Claudette, are from France, (I
just made those names up because we never exchanged names but hey, it’s my blog
and those are the names I hope to remember them by.)
They are excited to be in Iceland, a country they admire
because it has long been in the vanguard when it comes to protecting the environment.
(Iceland has become quite the destination for tree huggers, not that there are
any trees to hug because it’s above the timberline.) They arrived two days ago
and plan to spend the next month seeing as much of this amazing country as they
can. They say they’ve been cold ever since they stepped off the plane. (What
did they expect coming to Iceland in September which, weather-wise, reminds me
of Connecticut in December?) Jean-Claude
and Renee are saving money eating nothing but Ramen noodles, pitching their
tent in the countryside to avoid campground fees, and hitching rides. If they
have enough left over at the end of the trip they hope to rent an ATV to take
them into Iceland’s unsettled interior, which is said to be the most beautiful
part of the country. Today they’re headed to Geysir and Gullfoss. I tell them that’s
where I’m going and am glad to have them along for the ride.
They tell me about their first night in a Reykjavik campground and their second in a field outside the
town of Selfoss. They say both nights were as cold and rainy as today, maybe
worse.
Jules says he has found the natives to be cold. I remind him
they live in a country called Iceland. We laugh. We agree German travelers tend
to be pushy and that camera-carrying Japanese tourists who spend more time
taking pictures than actually looking at the attractions they visit (they’re ubiquitous
here, as they are everywhere) are obnoxious. Philippe and Brigitte tell me their
opinion about Americans. I tell them Americans think French waiters and hotel
clerks are rude.
Gaston and Madeleine say they were waiting a long time. Car
after car passed but nobody stopped until I came along. I’m glad I did because
being with them makes me feel 20 again.
 |
My sightseeing companions, Andre and Gabrielle,
with Geysir in the background |
Geysir isn’t all that impressive. I’ve never seen a geyser
before, but was somehow expecting something more, considering it’s one of
Iceland’s most visited attractions. I ask an American tourist if he has ever visited
Old Faithful. He says yes, and that it spurts higher and for much longer than its
Icelandic counterpart that belches a plume of steamy water for what seems no longer than two seconds.
 |
| Thar she blows |
After an hour watching Geysir spout off every five minutes
or so, we head to Gullfoss which, Paulette says, is supposed to be more
powerful than Niagara Falls. I say that’s unlikely; I can’t imagine anything
more powerful than Niagara.
But, by God, she is right. The top tier cascades over a
series of cliffs, forms a shallow pool, then topples off another side into a narrow
gorge so deep it’s difficult to see all the way to the bottom. There are no
fences. It’s possible to walk right to the edge of both falls. Within seconds we
are drenched with spray but hey, it was raining anyway so why not?
I ask where they plan to camp tonight. They say they think
they’ll stay in a field adjacent to the parking lot because the next day they want
to see how close they can get to the Langjokull Glacier that, through
the fog, is barely visible in the distance. They take their backpacks from the
Jimny and we bid adieu.
It’s lonesome in the Jimny. For a minute, until I pick up
another couple standing by the road outside the parking lot with outstretched
thumbs.
William and Catherine are from the southwest of England and
are about the same age as Thierry and Sophie. They, too, are here for a month
to visit a country that values its environment. They want to see it before it’s
ruined (presumably by tourists like us). Like Martin and Martine, they’re living on
noodles, camping wherever they can pitch their tent, hitching rides and hope to
rent an ATV to explore the interior. William is a big guy. I say I don’t see
how someone his size can possibly live on noodles. “He eats a lot of them,” Catherine
says. “It’s getting to be a problem.”
Once again I feel like a college kid as we laugh and chat
about their adventures.
We stop briefly at a roadside pull-off in Thingvellir Park,
where the European and North American Tectonic plates meet. One side is Old
World. One side is New. Cool.
I drop them off in a driving rain, near a campground where
they hope to spend the night, and head back toward Reykjavik. Not wanting to retrace
the route I followed this morning, I take another road that, had she come with
me, would scare my wife out of her wits. She is terrified of twisty,
mountainous roads – has been ever since we visited Tenerife in 2005 – and would
be especially terrified by this road that twists in, out, above and below
rainclouds that, at times, are dispensing sleet.
Dinner is a pizza near the hotel. I order an Americano –
ground beef, tomato, mushrooms and cheese. It is tasteless, but the Gull beer that
accompanies it is excellent.
Thursday, September 10
Today I will be driving nine or ten hours as I navigate the
Snaefellsnes peninsula, the westernmost part of Iceland that juts out into the
Atlantic about 60 miles northwest of Reykjavik. Once again, it’s raining and
foggy with gusty winds as I wend my way up Highway 1, the national road that
circles the island. It’s raining so hard I take a wrong turn that turns out to
be my best move of the day because, even though it adds an hour to my trip, the
road winds around a spectacular fjord.
In Bojarnes, a hamlet the guidebook calls “fun loving” (a
great phrase travel writers fall back on when they have nothing else to
describe an otherwise forgettable town), I stop at a convenience store for
coffee. As I’m enjoying it, a bus of school children stops and the kids file
in. The children of Iceland are beautiful. All but a few of the ones I’ve seen
are blonde with blue eyes just like their Norse ancestors, which makes sense
because Iceland is one of the, if not the, least ethnically diverse countries on
earth. Fully 93 percent of its inhabitants are of Norse descent. Unlike
Germany, Sweden, Denmark and other northern European countries that are packed
with work-seeking immigrants from southern Europe and Islamic countries, few
want to move to an Arctic island where the sun shines only a few hours a day in
winter and the average summer high temperature may, if you are lucky, reach the
upper fifties but that’s before you subtract ten degrees for the wind chill
factor. So the gene pool remains Nordic-pure.
 |
Have you ever seen a child with eyes this pale blue? Or hair this blond?
Oh wait, that kid isn't Icelandic. That's my 17-month-old grandson, Teddy. |
Speaking of wind, the windows of the C-store are rattling. I
don’t know how picture windows can possibly withstand gusts this relentless but
nobody seems alarmed, so I’ve got to assume it’s normal for this time of year.
My guidebook says that when I get to Gerouberg where the
peninsula begins, I will see “dramatic basalt towers rising from the plain.” It’s
pouring when I turn off on a gravel road toward Gerouberg. After half a mile or
so I come to what I assume are “basalt towers.” Don’t know for sure, never saw
basalt towers before. I step out of my car, getting soaked to the bone in the
time it takes to snap the picture below, and continue on my way.
 |
If you have ever seen the "dramatic basalt towers of Gerouberg,"
please let me know if these are them |
Half an hour later I arrive at the only roadside café on the
southern side of Snaefellsnes (try saying that three times fast). It is packed
with locals. There aren’t many of them, only 4,000 hardy souls inhabit the
whole of the fifty-mile long peninsula.
I order lamb soup, the only menu item that sounds vaguely appealing.
(I know, I swore never to eat lamb again but lamb soup somehow seems apropos on
a cold gray day like this.) It is completely devoid of taste – mushy root
vegetables and chunks of lamb that have had all the flavor they ever possessed
boiled out of them, in a thin lukewarm broth. But the slice of homemade rye
bread served with it is good.
As I exit the restaurant the rain has stopped and there’s
even a hint of sunshine through the low-hanging clouds. The wind, however, is
stronger than ever. Where I come from we call wind like this a Category 3 hurricane.
Thirty miles down the road a waterfall is toppling over a
cliff. (There are waterfalls – a waterfall is called a “foss” in Iceland –
every mile or so, so many it becomes annoying after a while because you’re not
sure whether you should stop and take a picture.) The breeze blowing in from
the ocean is so strong at this particular “foss” that the water that should be cascading
off the side of the mountain is being blown upwards
and backwards into the stream
from whence it came. How far back I can’t tell but as you can see if you look closely, it’s an
amazing sight.
 |
If you look closely, you can see the water that's supposed to be falling
over the cliff being blown upwards and backwards by the incredibly strong wind |
I stop to see the beach at Budir, another “must see”
according to the guidebook, but the waves are so huge it’s impossible to get anywhere
near it; I can feel the ocean spray a quarter mile away. There is a picturesque
little church overlooking the sea and on this dismal day a wedding is taking
place in the yard. The bride is wearing a sleeveless dress that looks like a gunnysack.
This marriage is doomed because the bride will be dead of frostbite soon.
At Arnarstapi, there’s a monument honoring Jules Verne whose
Journey to the Center of the Earth was
supposedly inspired by the eerie, rocky landscape.
From an observation deck built over the sea in Hellnar I can
see in the distance a rock kiosk formed by thousands of millennia (or least
three days) of winds like these.
I was hoping to get a glimpse of the Snaeffsjokull Glacier
as I swing northward but it’s covered with fog. Bummer. I would, if I were the
kind of guy who owned hiking boots, be welcome to join a daily expedition up
the mountain to the glacier that’s led by seasoned rangers, but I am not.
Arriving in the fishing village of Hellisandur at the northwest
tip of the peninsula I catch my first glimpse of the Arctic Sea. It looks, duh,
cold. I stop for gas in Grundarfjordur, another fishing village. The more I
interact with Icelanders, the better I’m understanding what my French friend was
saying. The clerk at the N-1 convenience store, a dour-looking woman about my
age, treats me like an inconvenience, another stupid American who has to be
shown how to use the credit card machine at the gas pump.
Just east of town a rainbow appears over a fjord.
Two and a half hours later I’m back in Reykjavik. Not
wanting Vietnamese, horse, pizza or lamb soup, I head downtown to find a
restaurant. The sun has finally decided to show its face and its rays are
slanting down the same way they slant in New England in the late fall, bathing
even the ugly buildings clustered around the harbor in beauty. Perhaps I was
too quick to judge the town my first day when I was tired, wet and cold.
I wander in and out of stores, looking for something to buy
Teddy, my 17-month-old grandson. I decide Teddy badly needs a plastic Viking
headpiece with horns, but no store has one in a child’s size.
I climb a hilly street painted the colors of the rainbow –
last month Reykjavik hosted the country’s second most-attended annual event, Iceland’s
gay pride parade, for which the street was painted – to the modernistic Hallgrimskirkja,
a church made of poured concrete that took more than 40 years to build. A well-traveled
fellow volunteer at the food bank where I work once a week told me I should be
sure to see it and, I have to admit, it’s nice if you happen to like
minimalistic no-frills Scandinavian design, which I am starting to.
 |
A hilly street painted in rainbow colors leading up to
Reykjavik's modernist Hallgrimskirjka church |
Dinner, my last in Iceland, is at an upscale Italian joint
on the town’s main shopping street. It is excellent. And expensive. What the
hell, I may not pass this way again but if I do I’ll be sure to eat all my
meals here.
Friday, September 11
 |
The rain and fog lift and finally, on my last morning,
I can see the view from my hotel room |
I eat an enormous breakfast, return to the Laugardalslaug for
a quick dip, check out of my hotel, drive to Keflavik, turn in the Jimny and
check-in for my flight.
I was hoping to find a Viking hat in Teddy’s size in one of
the airport’s duty-free shops but there wasn't one to be had so I bought him a puffin t-shirt that says “Iceland.”
